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What is PICT?

PICT is a collaborative model for teaching and learning that offers a practical, accessible means of internationalization. The premise of the model is the collaboration of two instructors from different institutions and cultural contexts who link their courses, and thus their students, for one or more modules. Students learn from both of the instructors as well as from each other, as they engage critically with a complex question or issue that has shared importance. PICT comes into its own where different methods are applied to problems or phenomena too complex to approach from one perspective alone. At the same time, students and instructors increase their cultural awareness of self, of other, and of the parallel, intersecting, and varying ways in which research and scholarship are conducted across regional, national, and other boundaries.

The PICT model of pedagogical collaboration can easily be shaped to fit within an instructor’s existing plan for a course. Its processes and resources are freely available: through Fair Dealing and Open Educational Resources, via applications such as Skype or FaceTime and platforms such as Moodle or slack.com. It enables instructors to work within their own existing curricular, administrative, and institutional frameworks. PICT represents an easily-modified process of course-based knowledge discovery, where exchanges within or across disciplinary practices enable experiential learning, student research, and real-world innovation.

The PICT model involves students in transformative pedagogy by focusing on a problem centred project supported through the use of common materials of study, real-time lectures by voice and video or in-person, and facilitated interactions. The cross-cultural, collaborative instructional dynamic encourages the development of discipline-specific problem-solving skills as well as an increased awareness of cultural context and its effects on scholarship. Students are thus empowered to reflect upon, apply, and modify existing cultural understandings in order to generate knowledge, to apply discipline-specific methods of inquiry independently and collaboratively, and to explore new possibilities for research mobilization and dissemination. Instructors are empowered through global partnerships and networks that have direct benefits in the form of research outcomes, teaching enhancement, and recruitment initiatives.